MISSION 25 – DONE DEAL – PART 1Written by: ??? Played on: 11 Dec 2010

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I have just recieved word that the next test subjects have been aquired. Due to the importance of this next step, I have personally selected these individuals out of a group of candidates proposed to me by my partners. I know some will not like my decisions, but the results should prove me correct. The Project is too important to leave up to chance and petty grievances.

Their files and personal histories are as disparate as their apparrent loyalty to eachother is strong. They are as equally unimpressive as they are unique and distinct from one another. The failed experiment who has proven more resilient than anticipated. The sadist doctor who would leave his life of comfort for the chance to live outside moral bounds. The whore brute with a taste for pain.

Our agent was able to turn the doctor as easily as he predicted. His apathy for the common good was why I deemed him unfit for the program. Following their latest “success”, he contacted our retrieval teams to alert them to the target locations.

Leading up to the conclusion of the campaign, I asked if any of the players had a particularly strong desire to begin a new character as oppossed to continuing with their current one. Given Levi’s checkered past with the group, his player decided it might be better to retire him and create a new character for the second campaign.

I agreed on the grounds that his “retiring” character at that point became mine to use an NPC. He was given a few in character goals to persue that were designed to line up with and assist the team until the end of the session finale.

At the end of the session, he was given his final character task; report on the location, activities and, if possible, assist in subduing all the members of his team.

The finale saw the team members being told to vacate Denver in a few days time, but for this first night, I let a few NPCs pressure them into a goodbye celebration party (also an opportunity for the players to celebrate the end of the campaign). As they indicated what their characters were doing for the night, I described the unfolding of each of their evenings, taking turns for each.

Each scene ended with the character being subdued via some drug administered in a variety of different scenarios or means. It was a stark transition from “celebration” to “oh shit”, but it also built up palpable tension at the end of the evening and intentionally ended the campaign on a cliff hanger for the next “season”.

The failed experiment has proven more resilient than anticipated. His magical training has grown since his procedures. We must be careful not to dampen those skills. He was retrieved at Denim, a Koshari club in Denver along with the corporate tool who thought he could change the status quo and fled Seattle.

The doctor’s tools, sedatives concealed by the flavor of strong liquor and fire, were simple but elegently delivered. Flowing alcohol and the sexual advances of a few beautiful faces only further served to conceal the ruse. The simple effectiveness of the lowest human drives should never be overlooked.

They have friends; friends who will search for him. The dwarf’s druggy friend will be no problem to mislead. The hacker brother, on the other hand, will be more difficult, though we have prepared for this eventuality. It will keep him busy and out of trouble for the time being.

They found the whore brute in her place of carnal lust, cycling through men like candy. It was not difficult to slip a new patron into her line up. The fool hung around too close after administering the horse tranquelizer. Before it froze up her nervous system, she crushed part of his face. He is fortunate to have access to our medical facilities to have it reconstructed. Her strength makes her an asset, if somewhat of a liability. Care will need to be taken, but it is important to see the effects of our tests on one like her.

The broken soldier, more machine than man, will be tricky to work with but just as important to ensure our procedures can be used on a wide variety of subjects. He and the violent asian girl were tracked to the Splatter Bar along with a local Coyote contact.

When the two women left to the restroom, one of our agents drugged the soldier with a dart. The consumption of alcohol and the nature of the VR shootout game was the perfect cover for delivering the silent tranquilizer shot. It was a simple matter to remove him as just another patron who had one drink too many.

Our agent tailed the women to the bathroom; the asian was the only target. The coyote turned out not to be a problem when she was found dead in a bathroom stall, slumped over a toilet with her neck snapped. It appears that both girls had an interest in the Soldier; only one was willing to eliminate the competition. Our agent administered a knockout spray as the target attempted to play the situation off.

The sadist doctor is an intersting one; leaving his life of comfort just to live a life outside of moral bounds in persuit of his own grand experiment. Were he not a sociopath, he of all people would most appreciate what we are doing. It is the same sociopathic tendencies that renders him unfit for the program. Per the deal made to enlist his aide, he is being relocated from Denver to a situation that better interests him.

Several other test subjects have been selected and retrieved for this program as well as the follow up variations, though none hold as much hope for me as these five do. Each will be evaluated on an individual basis by our researchers and fielded appropriately.

The subjects are sedated and even now cleansed and in transit to Seattle. It is encouraging to see the operation moving forward after waiting so long, but we had to be sure. We have spent over a year collecting information on these and other subjects, looking for specific traits and evaluating and discarding individuals as we went.

This team of Shadowrunners have proven themselves most capable. In their short time in Denver they made major inroads with several criminal and government organizations while nearly eliminating others single handedly. They responded to a variety of situations from the mundane to the bizarre with equal amounts of composure; surviving even a trip to another plane which few unawakened can claim.

In our own direct employment of their services, we were able to evaluate their skills directly and they performed better than expected. It is as subtle irony that they should soon be sent to the same lab as the equipment they safeguarded through Denver.

They even managed to create minor disruptions in our operations, though they would never know it. The death of the Triad shamen An-Peng, another of our potential candidates, was a nuisance though it told us much about them. Our researchers eventually concluded that the AI sprite, Taske, was too unstable to be manipulated or his base design adapted as an effective platform; at the time however, his destruction by the team was considered a great waste of a unique resource.

The capture and death of the Yakuza handler, Kazuya Hotomi, by the team was a potential disaster to our operation. However, the Triad syndicate leader, Lin Yao, proved an acceptable and easily manipulated pawn. As I suspected, placing the team near her at the right time was more than enough to get the Dragon Stone into their hands. Providing information on its wherabouts to the right people was then all it took to motivate events into action.

Kazuya Hotomi was the former Yakuza member known as the Dragon, whose daughter the team kidnapped and whom Hotomi subsequently murdered in Mission 03 – The Grab. They later tracked him down for Lady Jade at Club Kharma, owened by the Triad underboss Lin Yao, in Mission 08 – Chasing the Dragon.

The team spent nearly a week attempting to decipher the nature of the artifact, eventually determining that it must be a Draconic Memory Crystal. They eventually sought the aide of Raven, the Koshari Johnson they worked with on so many occassions, who examined the object and gave them exactly the answer we were hoping they would get: Give it to the ZDF. I am sure Raven did not fully understand what it was he saw in the Dragon Stone, but he pointed the team in the correct direction.